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Wilhelm Reich and subject test drive an Orgon Accumulator (Wikipedia photo). Bernie Sanders’ preoccupation with Reich and his close following of Reich’s teachings are reported in a new book, Bernie for Burlington by Dan Chiasson.
By Ted Cohen
A spicy new literary take on Vermont’s famous imported socialist takes a prurient peek behind the curtains into Bernie’s bedroom.
The upcoming book “Bernie for Burlington,” says Bernie Sanders once built himself a device so he could achieve “cosmos-shattering orgasms.”
The racy take on Vermont’s Brooklyn-born senior senator is authored by Dan Chiasson, a poet and journalist who is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and who grew up in Burlington.
Sanders, a follower of the ‘Father of Free Love’ in his youth, was heavily influenced by the controversial sex therapist Wilhelm Reich, according to Chaisson.
Reich believed that liberation could be achieved via enhanced climaxes.
He built a device called an “Orgone Accumulator,” which supposedly collected energy to be later released in the form of explosive orgasms.
Such was Bernie’s devotion to Reich that he even built his own orgone orgasm device, a five-foot-long prayer mat made of copper wire with spikes on it that he slept on to channel the “energy”into his body, Chiasson claims.
Sanders’ brother Larry told Chiasson that Reich was an influence that his brother “wanted to downplay” as his political career progressed.
However, during Sanders’ first run for the presidency in 2015 an article on an alleged Sanders’ “rape fantasy” came to light, throwing his campaign into a virtual talespin.
Chaisson’s controversial book was featured as a headline Sunday on the front page of the Drudge Report. (Drudge is no small potatoes, his site reportedly having received 25 million views in 24 hours as of Sunday.)
The Bernie book is to be released by Penguin Random House – no slouch itself in the publishing world – on Tuesday.
Bernie the youthful “climax king” came to Burlington nearly 60 years ago, eventually becoming mayor of Vermont’s largest city.
Sanders, whose climb up the political ladder has come with a commensurate meteoric rise in his personal wealth, now owns three houses.
After several unsuccessful attempts at statewide office in Vermont, he actually became mayor in a shocking 1981 upset of the entrenched Democrat incumbent, Gordon Paquette.
From the top of Burlington’s political establishment, Bernie got himself elected to the U.S. House, and from there he went to the U.S. Senate.
Though he ran for president a couple of times his political dream never climaxed in that office.
Bernie lost the nomination ten years ago to Hillary Clinton, wife of the nation’s actual climax king, then in 2020 to his self-septuagenarian, elderly anti-climax king Joe Biden.
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Categories: Book Review
Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper had the same thing.
I don’t want to know why it’s called an accumulator.
Please don’t let this kind of treatment of Reich’s work prejudice you against it. Orgone is just Reich’s word for Chi. From the beginning, Reich was demonized/marginalized by the usual suspects because his devices could gather Chi and improve people’s health. The world’s puppet masters don’t want healthy people. If you are interested in learning about it, The Orgone Accumulator Handbook: Wilhelm Reich’s Life-Energy Discoveries and Healing Tools for the 21st Century by James DeMeo, PhD is a good resource.
We all know that he is a flippen weirdo, so why would anybody question any of this ?
He was looking for love in all the wrong places,…….
Check out (GOOGLE) the satirical movie “The Free Lunch Express” about Boinie’s rise from the lower middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn to the most recognized socialist in America, you will see that he left the commune because about the only contribution that he made to life there was the crap spewing from his mouth ! Even the early hippies expected more from this slacker ! Some things never change .
And why is a young Bernie’s sexuality news? Seriously bottom-feeding here!
Brian;
We seldom agree. But I whole-heartedly agree with you here. Tawdry.
If you’re reading it, that’s why it’s news.
Bernie Sanders is a Domestic Terrorist! He has destroyed Vermont and made it unaffordable to all of the natives all while giving away taxpayer money to refugees and illegals. He has stolen millions from taxpayers and is currently being investigated for grand larceny and fraud. Stop voting Democrat! Progressive and independent is just another way to hide the true Democratic mentality!
The Bern was on my campaign staff when I ran for Congress the second time [in Dem primary 1971]……a very close election I unfortunately [or fortunately] lost. I could say a whole lot more……
Hey Denny, free speech on this platform……no limit. 🙂
Song — The Politician with a nod and thanks to G&S.
Chorus:
Yes Yes He is a politici-an. Yes Yes He is a politici-an.
Verse 1:
He is the very model of a modern politici-an,
Just point and he will toddle off to greet the next patrici-an.
Constituents are many and he wears a hat for most o’ them,
His thoughts aren’t worth a penny and he’ll gladly drink a toast to them.
Verse 2:
He thinks the FBI is always truthful and omniscient,
The CIA would never lie and Hillary is heaven-sent.
So genocide is good as long as Israel is doing it,
Yet peace ain’t understood if Trump and Putin are pursuing it.
Chorus:
Yet peace ain’t understood if Trump and Putin are pursuing it. (X 3)
Verse 3:
He stands up to the bankers and he makes them no apology,
He is the human insert into gastroenterology.
In short in sell-outs, trickery, deception and submissi-on
He is the very model of a modern politici-an.
Chorus:
In short in sell-outs, trickery, deception and submissi-on
He is the very model of a modern politici-an.
Verse 4:
He’ll answer all your questions with the same insipid flummery,
He’ll send you to the polls and then he’ll listen for the summary
For counting all the votes is something he’s not interested in,
He’s Judas Goat and cat’s paw for the party he’s invested in.
Verse 5:
He’s of the people so he sends us waste of high toxicity,
Destroys our homes for runways, which has wrapped him in complicity
By voting for exorbitant expense if it is militant
No matter where, no matter what, no matter how extravagant.
Chorus:
No matter where no matter what no matter how extravagant. (X 3)
Verse 6:
He thinks that he’s a mover and a shaker but he’s not ya’ see,
He’s merely just an errand boy and jester for the DNC.
So when it’s time to noddle to a shabby superstiti-on
He is the very model of a modern politici-an.
Chorus:
So when it’s time to noddle to a shabby superstiti-on
He is the very model of a modern politici-an.
This re-stimulates all of my Imaginary suspicions about Bernie flying around the country on private jets with AOC.
He’s done a good job putting the wood to the Vermont taxpayers for years. It’s easy to see why this interested him.
Ick
The link in the article did not work but since I had the time to kill for an amazon search, the book summary tells me Bernie is probably getting a cut from it. Just another tactic to keep himself in the news and relevant.
If it may possibly ever create another creature similar to Bernie, it must be outlawed forever.
Statement from the Wilhelm Reich Museum on Recent Publicity Surrounding Book About Bernie Sanders
A forthcoming book on Senator Bernie Sanders has attracted attention by noting his interest in Wilhelm Reich during his youth. Much of the media coverage of this detail, however, trades in caricature rather than history, repeating long-discredited narratives without reference to the extensive documentary record of Reich’s life and work.
That a young Bernie Sanders—like many others of his generation—took an interest in Wilhelm Reich is neither strange nor surprising. Reich’s ideas were widely read and debated in the mid-20th century and continue to be so today. His influence reaches far beyond the narrow stereotypes that journalists so often recycle.
Wilhelm Reich is widely recognized as the founder of body psychotherapy and a pioneer of mind–body approaches to emotional health. Long before such ideas became mainstream, Reich explored the unity of psychological and physiological processes—work that laid the groundwork for contemporary interests in somatic therapy, breathwork, trauma studies, and holistic models of mental health. These developments did not emerge in a vacuum; they grew, in part, from Reich’s clinical and theoretical contributions.
Reich was also a progressive social thinker whose work on sexuality, child development, and emotional well-being emphasized dignity, responsibility, and equality—not the crude notions of “free love” or excess so often attributed to him. He coined the term Sexual Revolution to address women’s equality, the emotional needs of young people, and the social conditions shaping working-class life, not to promote sensationalism.
As early as 1933, Reich took an unequivocal public stand against fascism with the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. This work directly challenged the psychological foundations of authoritarianism and mass submission, placing Reich on Nazi death lists and leading to the banning and burning of his books in Germany.
Later in his life, Reich became the target of an extraordinary campaign by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during the 1940s and 1950s. Millions of dollars were spent pursuing legal action against him—despite the absence of a single documented complaint of harm from users of orgone accumulators, of which only a few hundred existed worldwide. Contrary to persistent media claims, Reich never asserted that the orgone accumulator could cure cancer.
Reich’s legacy has endured not because of controversy, but because his ideas proved durable. Many of his core insights have quietly entered mainstream culture, psychology, and social thought—even as his name continues to be treated with disproportionate suspicion in popular media. Recent works such as Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom openly draw on Reich’s understanding of emotional life, underscoring his continuing relevance.
Interest in Reich’s work has not faded. In fact, it is growing. The Wilhelm Reich Museum preserves Reich’s work and archives for scholarly research and keeps his books in print, even as it has grown accustomed to the repetition of falsehoods, distortions, and inflammatory language surrounding his name.
Notably, The Mass Psychology of Fascism continues to sell steadily today—along with many of Reich’s other major works—despite the fact that not a single dollar is spent on advertising. Its ongoing readership speaks to the book’s continuing relevance rather than to any manufactured controversy. Each summer, nearly a thousand visitors travel to Orgonon in rural western Maine to experience the preserved site where Reich lived and worked, enjoy its scenic vistas, visit the Bauhaus-style stone structure he built—now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—and walk the free, publicly accessible hiking trails that cross the historic property.